Soleil of Persian Square studies the lifestyle of the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles through its visual identity. I try to put a face on this fictional city, called Tehrangeles, which I discovered in my youth through images related to popular music. The work aims to bring together ordinary scenes of Los Angeles and Orange County, which bear signs of this diaspora, portraits of its residents, objects from popular culture (cassette tape cases, song lyrics, screenshots of music videos from the 1980s and 1990s...), and pages from directories related to diasporan activity.
Soleil of Persian Square is not only a journey from real to imaginary space, it also looks at a way of life, a mindset, personified by popular culture. This culture (presently positioned against the moral values of the current regime in Iran), which is criticized by secular intellectuals for its “low” cultural aspects, nevertheless survives, namely in the pop music of Tehrangeles. The music we “love to hate” has never lost its place in the heart of a scattered nation, never stopped moving our bodies, whether in a taxi in Tehran, among friends in Paris, or at a concert in Toronto.


Hannah Darabi